Mid-sized businesses in the UK are Europe's worst performers when it comes to managing information risk.

According to recent research from information management firm Iron Mountain and PwC showed that the British are bit rubbish when it came to security. The survey involved 600 senior managers of mid-sized European businesses in the UK, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain.

The analysts compiled an index based on a set of measures that, if put in place and frequently monitored, would help protect the information held by an organization. Of the six countries included, the UK consistently fared the worst, achieving a score of only 55.08 against a target of 100. While there was no stand-out performer in Europe, Hungary outperformed the other European countries with the highest overall index score of 61.

Christian Toon, head of information risk at Iron Mountain Europe said it was a surprise that the British performed so badly. It was not as if they were playing football or anything.

"High-profile data breaches receive such widespread media attention in the UK, seriously damaging brand reputation. But the findings reveal that though many British businesses do have a data protection and information risk strategy in place, most fail to monitor its effectiveness," he said.

In Hungary, with its high level of ISO certification, businesses are more likely to have training programs, clear guidance, codes of conduct and employee communication programs in place. Toon said that while some countries performed better than others, the results suggest that there is a problem across the board with the way businesses regard information risk.

"Too few see the risk as a serious threat to their business. Addressing this shortcoming must start from the top. It's time for the Boardroom to start making Corporate Information Responsibility an integral part of their organisation, just as many have done with Corporate Social Responsibility," he said.

British Prime Minister David “One is an Ordinary Bloke” Cameron is facing a revolt within his own party over his cunning plan to monitor emails and website visits.

Over the weekend it was revealed how Cameron wanted ISPs to install hardware enabling GCHQ to examine "on demand" and in "real time" details of any phone call, text message or email, and any website visited. Labour gave up on a similar law in 2006 after opposition from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

But it looks like that opposition has not gone away, despite the fact that the Tories and their new Liberal Democrat chums are in power. David Davis, who was the first to the plate to bat against the bill has now been joined by Mark Field, a Conservative member of the the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the work of the intelligence agencies.

Field said that Government MPs were extremely concerned if this were to see the light of day in legislation were to see the light of day.

The British Justice Select Committee has called upon the government to issue custodial sentences for breaches of the Data Protection Act.

The Committee's report published today states that the fines typically administered for such offences are "inadequate" deterrents, and highlights the limitations in the powers of the Information Commissioner in investigating abuses of personal data. The move has got the thumbs up from security companies who stand to make a killing from a tightening up of the law.

Nick Lowe, VP of Sales EMEA at Privileged Identity Management expert Cyber-Ark, has said there must be tougher personal data abuse laws. "The misuse of privileged access to sensitive information is undeniably widespread and, with reports revealing that even bodies such as the police force have misused their powers, it is completely justifiable for there to be concern about the way that such issues are dealt with in the eyes of the law," he said.

While financial penalties can be a useful tool, at present they do not reflect the severity of the issue at hand. Without the ability to hand out significant fines that outweigh the often lucrative rewards of such offences, there is little to put people off committing these crimes in terms of punishment, he added.

For those incidents that violate the most personal of information, stronger penalties must be brought in - and it will be interesting to see if this goes as far as jail time. One of the biggest problems for the UK government if they adopted the committee's suggestion is that one of the biggest offenders in recent years has been its own Department of Defence which has a habit of losing laptops and thumb-drives.

If you wonder why there has been a lack of brilliant ideas coming out of Britain lately it might be because the nation's businesses are cutting back on research.

A third of British companies spend nothing on searching for new ideas, services and products according to a new survey conducted by IT consultancy Portal. The survey of 500 companies up and down the country found that only a fifth of companies spend more than five per cent of their revenues on research and development (R&D), despite the fact that nearly 52 percent recognise that innovation is critical.

In a whitepaper entitled “Innovation: the first casualty of a downturn”, the companies said that the economic downturn is the main reason for failing to invest in R&D. Less than seven per cent of respondents have increased their investment since the start of the recession in 2008 while nearly 14 per cent have “cut their investment in R&D enormously.” More than 48 per cent said they would invest more if the government was able to offer tax breaks on R&D expenditure.

Lack of available funds is not the only reason for companies failing to invest sufficiently. Perceived difficulty of the process is deterring some from applying sufficient resource too.

Anonymous is threatening to bring down the UK judiciary and the Metropolitan police's computer systems today. Apparently this is in response to News International's phone hacking scandal and at the extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

A Twitter feed purporting to belong to Sabu, a senior figure within the group and the founder of the spin-off group LulzSec, which hacked a site linked to the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, promised two releases of information would be launched within a day. A follow-up message read: "ATTN Intelligence community: Your contractors have failed you. Tomorrow is the beginning."

Chat channels has suggested several top-level members of Anonymous are eager to launch attacks based around Julian Assange's appeal hearing against extradition, which begins today. There are rumours that an Anonymous member had broken into the News International servers and taken copies of some internal emails which were being offered for sale.

New research by one of the UK’s leading online independent travel agencies has revealed that more than half of British holidaymakers used social media platforms in the run up to their trip abroad to gain personal recommendations and reviews beforehand.

According to a new poll by one of the UK’s leading online independent travel agencies, social media platforms play a large part in holidaymakers’ decisions about where to visit. According to the poll, half holidaymakers claim to have used sites such as Facebook and Twitter to gather recommendations and reviews from people who may have personal experience of certain resorts.

The poll was carried out by www.sunshine.co.uk, which noticed an increase in traffic directed from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Apparently more than 1,102 British holidaymakers subsequently took part, each of whom had been abroad in the past two years. Respondents were asked questions regarding how they went about selecting their eventual holiday destination.

Respondents were initially asked, ‘Did you research your chosen destination and accommodation before booking and going on your last holiday?’ to which the overriding majority, 98 percent said ‘yes’. These respondents were then asked to select all that applied from a list of possible answers about how exactly they researched their chosen destination and/or accommodation.

Review websites were the largest recommenders with 62 per cent. However this is pretty much to be expected. Social media platforms had 49 per cent. Only a third asked their travel agent. More than 26 per cent used word of mouth and one in five used a travel guide. Of the respondents who selected social media platforms as a means of researching holiday destinations and accommodation before booking, 61 per cent said they used Facebook, whilst 17 per cent said they used Twitter to do so.

A Blighty programmer, blogger and online campaigner wants to make the Babbage Analytical "Engine" which was designed and never built.

The Analytical Engine was designed by Charles Babbage and has all the hallmarks of a modern computer. It had a program, on punched cards, a CPU which was called the 'mill' for doing calculations and it has memory. It was designed, but Babbage only got around to making bits of it. However it was seen as the first real attempt at a computer.

Writing in his bog, John Graham-Cumming said it would be a marvel to stand before this giant metal machine, powered by a steam engine, and running programs fed to it on a reel of punched cards. It would also be a great educational resource so that people can understand how computers work. One could even imagine holding competitions for people to write programs to run on the engine, he said.

He wants to run the the project as a charity that would donate the completed machine to either London's Science Museum or the National Museum of Computing.

UK coppers are trying to find out how a memory stick containing top secret anti-terror documents was found dumped in the street. The USB memory stick contained 2,000 pages of highly-sensitive and confidential information.

It included how to deal with terrorism on British streets include strategies for acid and petrol bomb attacks, blast control training and the use of batons and shields. Just to be handy there was a list of top terror cop's names, ranks and their divisions.

It was dumped on the pavement outside the police station in Stalybridge, near Manchester where it was found by a 34-year-old businessman who was astounded by the contents when he fitted it into his laptop to check what was on it. Apparently it was not password protected.

He was so shocked he handed it into the press because dropping it into the Cop Shop where he found it might be a bit tricky.

The UK press is all a flutter with the news that have of UK people prefer reading books and watching TV on their iPads. This will be news to the colossal numbers of people in Blighty who do not even own an iPad, but the silly season story made its way into the very serious Daily Telegraph newspaper so it must be true.

The yarn was based on “research”, which was carried out by Cooper Murphy Webb which is an advertising company and has been widely reported in the Apple press over the weekend. If you believe the research, Brits are abandoning books and print for the iPad. More than 41 per cent said that their ‘preferred method of reading books’ was via an iPad, beating print, which was preferred by 36 per cent of those polled.

However the study of UK people was based on a population of 1,000 UK iPad owners. Of them 43 per cent use the device for more than 10 hours a week and that the majority of users rarely took the iPad outside of the home. Only five per cent of those questioned, ‘always’ left home with their iPads, whereas 35 per cent said that they ‘rarely’ took the device out with them.

So what we have here is a headline which claims that 41 per cent of people prefer reading on their iPads when it is only 41 per cent of iPad users.

UK Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said that some of the savings that the government will be making on its IT budget will be made by sorting out resellers who charge them too muck. Maude revealed that different sections of the government had purchased the computer monitor with a price variation of 170 per cent.

He said last week he met with bosses of the 19 largest suppliers to government departments in order to discover ways in which the leading firms can assist in realising the planned savings of £6.2b by reducing procurement costs. In short “stop robbing the government blind and you might get a few more sales”.

The minister wants to improve "the procurement of goods and services for the whole government using our aggregated scale to drive down prices. He thinks that this will remove the discrepancies such as the variation of 170 percent in the cost of a standard computer monitor, and renegotating with the government's biggest suppliers on a portfolio basis to take out excessive cost.

The government's spending on IT consultants is also being looked at as well as various governmental web sites, some of which had been found to be competing with each other.